


If You Believe You Were An Island

by philos_manthanein



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-18 10:06:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8158331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philos_manthanein/pseuds/philos_manthanein
Summary: Or "What if Jeremy and Waylon had met in college before the game's events?"





	1. Chapter 1

They didn't even speak that first day. There was no reason. At the time it barely registered in Jeremy's mind that Waylon was the reason he kept glancing over to that corner of the campus library. Barely, but just enough.

That attractive young man seeming so young for college really, cocooned in the corner with stacks of books. Something to look at besides shelves. A distraction from the tedium of his own studies. That day he noticed Waylon chewed on pen caps when he was thinking.

* * *

 

The second day came a week later. Same library. Nearing winter break, he remembers because it was snowing and everything seemed so cold and gray. Sluggish. He'd read the same paragraph of whatever textbook he'd been working from five times before he packed everything up to leave. It just wasn't happening that day.

When he rounded a bookshelf his feet caught something and he toppled over, landing rough against the carpet.  When he sat up he felt the ground shifting, making groaning noises, and he realized he'd tripped over someone. At first he felt angry, what idiot takes up the floor when there are innumerable chairs and tables around? But they apologized first, voice unusually quiet and small.

That was the first time he heard Waylon speak. Nobody else came through that section and he was having trouble finding the information he was looking for, so he decided to browse there instead of carrying so many books back and forth, he explained.

“Sorry, are you okay?” He smiled then and Jeremy felt like he would covet it for years.

A warm wash that he swore bathed the gray world in gold. That second day he learned Waylon was warmth - radiant and magnetic – unavoidable no matter how hard he would try.

* * *

 

The third day it ceased to be coincidence. It was after winter break and the snow was nearly a foot deep. Most classes were canceled due to weather, but the library was open. So it meant there was a chance Waylon could be there.

Jeremy didn't even know his name at the time. But he thought about him. All break he thought about him. How he wanted to get to know him. Because if he did chances were he'd discover the faults, the inadequacies, like always, and the warm little spark of interest he had would fizzle out.

It didn't.

Because when he found Waylon that day he wasn't studying. Wasn't sprawled on the floor making a hazard of himself. Wasn't smiling.

Instead staring out the window and curled in a worn chair, eyes red and features tired, sad. Cheeks glistening and pink only for the moment, until he noticed Jeremy there and wiped them with the sleeve of his sweater.

There was pain there, deep and dark and it should have made him turn away. He hated dealing with people's baggage. It was the perfect imperfection, the red flag, the excuse he needed.

He sat down, asked if Waylon was okay, and waited minute after minute until he opened up. Let Jeremy hear all the things that should have annoyed him but didn't. And in the end he asked Waylon for his name and Waylon laughed and told him and it was so, so worth it somehow.

On that third day Jeremy realized he liked making Waylon laugh and smile. Wanted to be the reason. The catalyst. The center of his small, warm little world.

* * *

 

The fourth day came right after the third in a furious blizzard that froze the entire University. Even the library, that fortress. So there was no reason to see him at all. Jeremy rented a house off-campus (or, rather, his parents did) and he had no idea where Waylon stayed. Judging from the way he talked about his past chances were it was a dorm.

He wasn't pining. Interested sure but not so obsessed. Not yet. Not as much as he could be. _Would_ be.

The wind and snow died down by noon and he decided to go out, brave the drifts, to get something to eat at the convenience store on the corner. He'd never been to it before, preferring the more prestigious, expensive organic grocery store a few blocks down. But he certainly wasn't walking that far in the snow. Desperate times and all that.

Waylon looked like someone was aiming a speeding truck at him when Jeremy walked in. Dressed in a gaudy uniform and mid-way between ringing up some woman and her kids. Jeremy was surprised too, but he waved and smiled and watched as Waylon fumbled with the customer's change. Watched a flush of pink burst across his cheeks and the tips of his ears.

Embarrassed by his job. Embarrassed Jeremy saw. Knowing somehow Jeremy wasn't having to make ends meet in college. It should have been pathetic, a turn off, but Waylon managed so precisely to seem so adorable, so forgivable.

So in want for all the mercies Jeremy didn't think he had.

The fourth day, somewhere between picking out frozen pizza and asking Waylon for his phone number, Jeremy discovered his time with Way would no longer be measured in days but in smiles and gestures, gasps and whispers, sighs and screams.

 


	2. Chapter 2

They would agree later that it was their first date. At the time it was just a meet-up, something casual and unofficial. Not so togged out as Jeremy had been taught to treat a first date. Then again, Jeremy rarely took his mother's lessons in etiquette and expectancy at face value. (Waylon would probably implode from the pressures of lunch back home, let alone a traditional date.)

So, coffee and studying were good substitutes. A hip little café, one of a dozen spread across the campus area, with local bands on the stereo and everyone pretending they were just so eclectic. Jeremy made a game of pointing out which hipsters were going to wind up working retail, or worse, the rest of their lives. Waylon elbowed his side, worried they'd hear, but he also tried to cover his own disgracefully amused laugh.

Jeremy didn't study at all. How could he when he was learning more important things? Like how Waylon preferred natural sugar to processed. Cocoa powder to syrup. Whole milk to cream. He didn't like raisins in his pastries. Jeremy didn't either but he offered to eat the ones Waylon picked out of his muffin anyway.

Important, precious things he'll suddenly remember when everything goes to hell...

Like the way sunlight catches in Waylon's hair and shines in his eyes and the lit in his voice when he asks what Jeremy is looking at. As if he doesn't know, can't fathom, how mesmerizing he is. Intoxicating. How he makes Jeremy think in riddles and poetry and all that fuzzy frilly romance novel trash he used to be so cynical about.

When everything goes to hell, this is what he'll recall: Smiles and gestures.

* * *

 

Waylon's interests were so varied and layered Jeremy wondered how he never found it suffocating. How he could buzz around from subject to subject; if you got him started it took forever to get him to stop.

It was funny and cute, especially when he caught himself and suddenly went quiet, shifting from foot to foot, flush with embarrassment. He worried Jeremy would find him annoying. Said it countless times between whispered apologies. Jeremy kissed him and he'd still and the anxiety melted out of him.

It always worked, from the first time to the last.

Jeremy's interests, by comparison, seemed so plain and nonspecific. He liked music, but no particular genre. Liked movies, but no specific type. He traveled quite a bit, but kept few mementos.

There's a purpose for being so broad. It gave him more chances to connect with people, to charm them with a wide swath of knowledge. Networking. Build a repertoire. You never know who you'll need to call on later. Who you'll have to use to accomplish your goals. To get what you want.

Waylon's interests were hardly marketable, save for his skills in IT. But he was so passionate, so sincere, about his love for them Jeremy found he appreciated them more than he would have alone.

Of course, there was also that competitive spark that beset his pulse. As cute as Waylon was when babbling about the newest game or show, he was even more adorable, irresistible, when Jeremy made him shut up about it. When Jeremy pulled him into his lap and kissed his hair and bit and sucked at his neck. Intentionally leaving marks in ever more embarrassing places.

Until Waylon forgot about anything else but him. Until he forgot his insecurities too, because his body was always so attractive and erotic to Jeremy. Until he was nothing but a mess of heat and noise, clinging to him while Jeremy fucked him into whatever surface was convenient at the time.

And gasps and whispers became his deepest interest by far.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

It was a desperate kind of love in the end. The kind one tries to hold together, to save, with any kind of reasoning. Even if it's unreasonable. Even when it's obviously temporary. Clinging to the things that used to make it work but no longer do.

The worst part is Jeremy hadn't realized how far they had fallen out of love until it was too late. Until he no longer obsessed over Waylon's words and mind and all those warm precious things. Instead he wanted control, to be sure Waylon was his, entirely, without doubt. But Jeremy grew so flush with doubt and anger those last days.

So, Waylon's betrayal in the end was hardly a shock. They had been falling apart for a long time. Jeremy knew it was his fault, though it was not something he felt guilty for. He had done everything to secure their future. Had sacrificed so much, he thought, to make Waylon happy. To rescue him from all the wretched things that made him so peculiar. So sad and uncomfortable.

This company, a twisted machine in the guise of a business and charitable values, was what would help Jeremy attain his rightful place in the world. Waylon never learned to be grateful for that. So focused on the morality of what they did. Too concerned with ethics to see the bigger picture. Too blinded by what he thought was right to see he was wrong.

It strained them. Tore them apart. Their differences became less admirable and more like canyons, cold and vast, separating them from each other. Jeremy had tried to bridge it, but it always collapsed. Always ended with words taken too harshly and actions too brutal. Grabbing and throwing and taking, by force, the things Waylon used to give him so freely.

The greatest insult Waylon ever gave him, refusal.

The betrayal didn't start with the email, though in a way that was the end. No, it came in increments, time pilfered away on trivial arguments that in hindsight weren't trivial at all. Until Jeremy spent more time at work. Less calling, less texting, less everything. Waylon stopped telling him how wrong this was. How much he'd changed. Jeremy stopped reminding Waylon he was the one who changed, who refused to be adaptable, refused to see what was so obvious to Jeremy.

The canyon grew and forced them apart, separate homes, separate beds, separate arms within those beds. Jeremy had always thought he'd force himself to be faithful. (Unlike his father with too much money and too wandering an eye, giving Jeremy an ever increasing litter of half siblings across the globe.) Jeremy wanted so bad to be faithful, but Waylon made it difficult.

In the end the people he fucked in their bed reminded him less and less of Waylon and his comforts. Where he once tried to remember, in the end he tried so hard to forget. So that by the very end, when everything was falling apart, all Jeremy wanted was to see Waylon dead. To make him pay, not just for the betrayal at Mount Massive but for everything. To take from him everything he had taken from Jeremy.

Every stolen breath over books and expensive coffee. Every wasted night spent with their skin pressed tight and hot and needing. Every morning woke to gentle kisses and the skirting of fingertips against his face. Even more for those mornings he woke alone.

Sighs and screams.

Sighs and screams.

At the very end, as he's about to be taken to pieces, all he sees are Waylon's glassy eyes, hurt and afraid. All he hears are his sighs and screams.

And he feels at once so sincerely sorry for everything. All at once remembering so deeply that he still, still loves Waylon so much. Desperately, he opens his mouth to say it.

But he never gets the chance.

 


End file.
